Turning leads into sales online is no simple task. Many marketers watch as traffic flows in and out of their websites and wonder why they’re not getting more conversions.
That’s because there are so many nuanced triggers you need to set up perfectly in order to promote the user behavior you’re looking for. Even one mistake in how you create your sales funnel can make it almost impossible to get sales.
Here are the deadly lead generation mistakes you probably don’t know you’re making – and how to fix them.
Marketing on the Wrong Platforms
It seems like a reasonable idea to focus your marketing efforts on the most widely used platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, since some of your audience is bound to be using them.
But even if your potential leads do use these platforms, they’re not necessarily the ones they use to inform their buying decisions. Suddenly, less popular but more relevant platforms (such as LinkedIn or Quora) become all the more valuable.
The Fix:
Pay attention to platform popularity and demographics to inform where your marketing efforts should lie, but don’t forget the importance of answering these questions about your audience as well:
- Which platforms do they trust beyond just entertainment value?
- Whose opinions do they often seek when making buying decisions?
- Where do they normally do their research?
The answers to these questions should give you a much better idea of where to channel the bulk of your marketing efforts.
Ignoring Offline Opportunities for Lead Generation
It makes a lot of sense that marketers should focus most of their energy towards online lead generation, since many people now research their buying decisions online exclusively.
What doesn’t make sense is ignoring offline opportunities altogether.
Believe it or not, some leads really are the most moved by face-to-face interactions, even if they are fans of online research.
The Fix:
Especially for B2B marketers, pay attention to opportunities to showcase at conferences or trade shows. They don’t have to take up the bulk of your marketing time, but keep in mind that for this year, in-person events were considered the most effective lead generation strategy:
Having A Complicated Lead Capture Form
It can be appealing to try and get as much information about a potential lead as possible when putting together a lead capture form. But that can result in an overly-complicated sign-up process – which makes it much more likely that your potential leads will never become leads at all.
Research has shown that 86% of visitors will abandon the sign-up process if they think it takes too much time.
The Fix:
Stick with the basics by asking for their name and email address, and rely on your CRM software to track your leads for you.
Or, if you just have to ask for the visitor’s city, state, and zip code, use asterisks to indicate required fields so they don’t decide to run away from the form.
Forgetting Your Call-to-Action (CTA)
Your CTA is the most essential part of your lead-generation campaign. Even if you develop the most convincing piece of content imaginable, it will all be for naught if you don’t offer a CTA with it.
The Fix:
Make sure you include a CTA with every piece of content you create. CTAs should also appear encapsulated in static sidebars across your website.
Make every effort to ensure that your CTA is easy to find no matter where the visitor is looking, and make sure it stands in contrast to the surrounding content.
Neglecting to Remarket
There are a lot of potential reasons why a lead ends up not converting. It could be that your product or service wasn’t for them, or maybe they loved it and didn’t have the funds to buy.
That’s why it’s important to continue targeting prospects who expressed interest in the past. They’re much more likely than the average person to continue to be interested, even if they didn’t buy already.
The Fix:
Be on the lookout to reconnect with prospects who made it part of the way down the sales funnel. Facebook Custom Audiences is a great tool for this – it allows you to run ads targeted at specific email addresses that you gathered from your CTAs.
Not Using a Variety of Content
A common mistake that marketers make is thinking that they need to develop a certain ‘something’ to attract new leads. A well-researched white paper can bring in a lot of prospects, but if you stop there, don’t expect to keep attracting more leads in the long term.
That’s why B2B content marketers use an average of 13 marketing tactics to increase their chances of drawing in different kinds of leads:
The Fix:
Instead of pushing the same offers over and over again, focus on offering as many content types as possible (that make sense for your target audience). Some will inevitably be much more effective than others, but as a whole, they’ll work to capture the widest range of potential leads.
As long as the time and money put into the offer ends up being worth the ROI, it’s a valuable part of your lead generation strategy.
Offering Irrelevant Content
I just got done telling you that developing a wide variety of guides, webinars, and other content is a great way to nurture leads. However, it’s also important to remember that not all of your audience will find the same content valuable, especially if you’re in a very narrow niche.
For example, a CRM company would need to develop different content to bring value to a growth stage company than to a startup. And a digital marketing agency trying to convert the lead of sales would need to take a different approach than if they were dealing with the CEO.
The Fix:
You should develop primary and secondary buyer personas (at least), and develop content that serves their unique needs. Many CRM systems can use information about the characteristics of your leads to target them with the most relevant material.
Not Creating Unique Landing Pages
Some novice marketers equate landing page with website URL, but that’s a big mistake.
Landing pages are supposed to be specifically designed for an individual objective, beyond just getting someone to your website. They should be aimed at simplifying the conversion process by providing focus.
Whatever page you’re sending visitors to needs to be just as targeted as the content, ad, or social share that got them to click in the first place. Having a bad message match between ad and landing page is a surefire way to get a lot of bounces.
The Fix:
Develop unique landing pages for your Google Ads, Facebook Ads, social platforms, etc. Use it as an opportunity to create a page that targets a specific demographic of your audience based on the source of the click.
Conclusion
In the digital marketing age, there are so many different ways for marketers to draw the interest of potential leads. But at the same time, this complex system makes it easy for small oversights to cause your leads to slip through your fingers.
Pay attention to these deadly mistakes that might not have seemed so poisonous before, and use their fixes to improve your chances of moving the maximum number of leads down the sales funnel in the future.
Images: Content Marketing Institute’s 2016 B2B Content Marketing Report, Content Marketing Institute’s 2016 B2B Content Marketing Report